YMMV / Laurel and Hardy

• Awesome Music: Neil Brand's score for You're Darn Tootin', written for the 2006 documentary "Paul Merton's Silent Clowns".
• Fan Nickname: "The Boys" is a collective nickname for the duo.
• He Really Can Act: Stan Laurel as Lord Paddington in A Chump at Oxford. Oliver Hardy alongside John Wayne in The Fighting Kentuckian.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Where The Flying Deuces concludes with Hardy dying and coming back as a horse was done for a combination of Tearjerker, Heartwarming, Darker and Edgier and pure silliness; nowadays a particular group of fanfiction writers would consider it to be a fairly typical setup.
• Ho Yay: Yes, but really only by today's standards; the notion that "close friends of the same sex = homosexual tension" is a modern idea that would have never occurred to Stan and Babe.
  • However, the silent short Liberty involves them breaking out of prison, changing out of their uniforms and into civilian clothes, getting each other's pants by mistake, and then repeatedly being caught in public dropping their pants while trying to swap them, leading to hilarious amounts of Not What It Looks Like.
  • And at the end of Our Wife Stan and Ollie do somehow end up married. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • Especially in one scene in Beau Hunks where Ollie caresses Stan's foot, thinking that it's his foot. Then it starts getting hilarious when he blows on Stan's toes for no reason.
  • In Busy Bodies, Stan tries to get Ollie's hands out of a wooden window frame, and it looks like he's twerking the camera.
  • Their First Mistake probably has the most Ho Yay out of everything they made.
    • One scene has Stan and Ollie rolling around on Stan's bed like bored kids. And then they start talking about the argument Ollie has just had with his wife, and this happens.
    Ollie: She says I think more of you than I do of her.
    Stan: Well you do, don't you?
    Ollie: Well, we won't go into that.
    • When the solution to Ollie's marital problems (according to Stan) is to adopt a baby, they return to surprise Ollie's wife with the new baby, only to find her gone. It is revealed that she wants to divorce Ollie, and is suing Stan for the alienation of Ollie's affections! And when Stan tries to leave too, it leads to the following exchange which has hilarious amounts of Does This Remind You of Anything?.
    Stanley: Well, I'll be seeing you.
    Oliver: Where are you going?
    Stanley: Just going down...
    Oliver: Well you can't leave me alone here with this child.
    Stanley: Why?
    Oliver: Why? Well you're just as much responsible for it as I am.
    Stanley: What have I got to do with it?
    Oliver: What have you got to do with it? What have YOU got to do with it? Why you were the one who wanted me to have a baby, and now that you've gotten me into this trouble, you want to walk out and leave me flat.
    Stanley: But I don't know anything about babies.
    Oliver: Well you should have thought of that before we got it.
    Stanley: I don't wanna get mixed up in this thing. I've got my future, my career to think of.
    Oliver: Your career. What about me? What will my friends say? Why I'll be ostricized.
    Stanley: Well I don't want to lose my hook, line and sinker.
    Oliver: So, you're going to desert me, just when I need you most.
    [Stan hurtles towards the door, Ollie runs and beats him to it]
    Oliver: You're not leaving this room.
  • It's common for Stan and Ollie to share a bed in a totally platonic way, but when sometimes when they sleep together, they look a little too cosy...
    • A brief scene in the trenches in Pack Up Your Troubles has Stan and Ollie sharing a small bed together. Their limbs are tangled up, Ollie is practically laying on Stan, and their feet are entwined around a hot water bottle. It's adorable.
    • From the afore mention ho yay-athon that is ''Their First Mistake', there is a scene towards the end where Ollie, Stan and the baby are all fast asleep, only for the baby to start crying. Half asleep, Ollie shoves the bottle into Stan's mouth, and wraps his arm around him, pulling him close.
• Iron Woobie: Stan. He goes through HUGE amounts of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of Ollie, and yet is still patient and often retaliates in a tit-for-tat way.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Ollie dies for real in The Flying Deuces. Cut to Stan, now poor, wandering along a country lane...then comes Ollie reincarnated as a (rather cross) horse.
• Memetic Mutation: Stan's "magic thumb lighter" from Way Out West is the subject of many fanart. Similarly is a well known picture◊ of the duo putting their fingers to their mouths to say "SSH!"-It even provides the main page image!
  • The dance the two do in Way Out West has been remixed several times on Youtube.
  • "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!"
  • From Brats: "You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead."
• Moe: Stan for the most part, due to his adorable smile and the fact that he is the more child-like of the duo. Ollie could also be regarded as a big, cuddly, very grumpy teddy bear.
• Most Wonderful Sound: An in-universe example-in Beau Hunks, it's the sound of Laurel and Hardy coming to help the trapped and outnumbered garrison at Fort Arid (who think reinforcements have arrived.)
• Older Than They Think: Long before anyone had heard of Homer Simpson, the exasperated cry of "D'oh!" was a trademark of frequent L&H foil Jimmy Finlayson.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • A very young Jean Harlow briefly appears in three 1929 shorts.
  • A young Robert Mitchum has a small, uncredited role as a gangster posing as an insurance salesman in The Dancing Masters.
  • One of the university students who prank Stan and Ollie in A Chump at Oxford is played by a young Peter Cushing.
• Seasonal Rot: It is near universal consensus that the films Laurel and Hardy made from 1941 to 1951, after they parted from Hal Roach, are poor and don't stand up to their 1930s work.
• So Okay, It's Average: The 1960s animated series by Hanna-Barbera is widely seen as being this. Most would agree that it's a perfectly competent series in its own right, but one that doesn't do much to stand out from other animated shows that were being made at the same time, and only very vaguely captures the essence of the duo's comedy.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The films being made and set in The Roaring '20s and The Great Depression some 90 to 80 years ago naturally come off as this.
  • From Sugar Daddies, amusement parks used to have rides where people were rolled around in spinning cylinders with no seatbelts or seats.
  • From Putting Pants on Phillip, pants were not often mass-produced in assorted standard sizes, so men had to often go the nearest tailor for a custom fitting.
  • Laughing gas was commonly used by dentists.
  • Men slept in nightshirts a lot more frequently than today.
  • To start a Ford Model T, a crank needed to be turned, like a clockwork robot toy.
  • 78 RPM records were fragile and broke easily, as seen in Liberty and Unaccustomed As We Are.
  • It was necessary to strike a match in order to turn on a stove, as seen in Unaccustomed As We Are.
    • And the matches themselves tended to be the "strike anywhere" type that could be lit on, say, the back of one's pants.
  • Saps at Sea shows an early electric hearing aid in 1940.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Bonnie Scotland has not aged well at all—it was set during a time when the British Empire still ruled, and it shows the mutinying Indians as evil villains, when they were in fact fighting against British racism themselves. Similarly, Pardon Us has the boys donning blackface makeup to hide on a suspiciously happy cotton plantation.
  • Less egregiously, Chickens Come Home has mayoral candidate Ollie being blackmailed by an old flame, with the implication that merely having once had an out-of-wedlock sexual relationship—not even an affair, as he clearly states that it happened before he was married—would be seen as a shocking past indiscretion that could cost him the race.

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